AMD Vega High Bandwidth Cache Doubles Usable Graphics Memory

We talked about the AMD Vega architecture and what all the science behind it meant for gamers. The two interesting things we found about the architecture without the lingual trickery is that it will allow users with 4 GB VRAM cards to get 8 GB performance and the 8 GB VRAM cards will be able to perform like 16 GB VRAM cards and so on. That is what we see here as well with the high bandwidth cache system that has been introduced with AMD Vega.

Anther important thing worth mentioning about AMD Vega is that object that is visible will be rendered and not stuff that the gamer cannot see. Only visible objects will be rendered and hence more load is put on the GPU.

With regards to the High Bandwidth Cache from a gaming perspective. We looked at all the modern games, the big games that push memory hard, and one of the things we noticed is the VRAM – graphics memory – utilization. We look at how much of the VRAM that the game allocates. So if the game say needs 4GB of memory when we looked at actually how much of that memory is actually used to render pixels we found that many games, actually most games, don’t use more than 50% of what they allocate.

That’s because the current/old GPU architecture doesn’t give you flexibility to move memory in fine granularity. So with Vega and with the High Bandwidth Cache and the HBC controller, for games it will utilize the amount of frame-buffer you have much more efficiently. So effectively you can think of it as Vega will be doubling your memory capacity for games.

AMD Vega High Bandwidth Cache In Action

He was asked if existing games will also consume fewer resources and the following was his answer in this regard:

For example say a game is built for 4GB and say you have a 4GB card it all plays well but when you swap in, for example, you alt-tab out of the game and go into a browser or something or do something quick and you come back, it takes a long time. Because the whole thing was swapped out and swapped in.

So with Vega, you will see that stuff become much more efficient. Because it didn’t really. like I said it wasn’t using all 4GB it was only using a portion of it. So we didn’t actually load that up all inside your precious cache. So you will see those kinds of benefits. But, let’s say you have a game that wants to push 8GB when you turn high details on and so on, it will run much more efficiently in a 4GB configuration.